RV Blog: Thoughts on runtime verification and software quality from leaders in the field.

Smart contract failures can cost millions of dollars and can even lead to death of companies and of cryptocurrencies. Moreover, smart contracts are easier to attack by hackers than ordinary software, simply because they are public on the blockchain and anyone can invoke them from anywhere. Therefore, there is an unprecedented need to guarantee the correctness of code.

It is well-known that the only way to guarantee code correctness is through the use of rigorous formal methods, where the correctness of the smart contract is expressed mathematically as a formal property, the programming language or virtual machine is also expressed mathematically as a formal model, and the former is rigorously proved from the latter. Moreover, the correctness of smart contracts must be independently checkable, without having to trust their authors or any auditing authorities. Therefore, they must be provided with machine checkable correctness certificates.